RA's can be pretty cool

Seriously, RA's are really not that bad... I mean some are just awful, but that is more of an unfortunate occureance. Mostly all of the RA's that I have met have been helpful and social. Every now and then, though, an RA will slip through who really like power. That does not happen very often though.

RA's, or residential assistants, actually have to interview for the job. I am lucky enough to have an RA who has had several years of experience. This makes her a great source of advice on pretty much everything dorm related.

One of the really big reasons to be nice to your RA is that they are there to help you and eventually you may need help. Do not treat them like someone who is only there to be a parent replacement. Plus, if you get in good with your RA then you tend to get away with more stuff than the other people on your floor do. Be careful with this because it can get you hated really easily. Do not suck up to your RA- this is very see through and will just make them hate you and see you as a suck up.

The #1 reason to be nice to your RA is that they are a person, and quite frankly one of your floormates.

THE ROOMMATE FROM HELL!!!

All who currently or who have lived in a dorm know that at one time or another your roommate does something that is really annoying or out of line. sometimes this is something so small that later on we look back at it and realize how petty it was, but other times it is a story that we continue to tell long after we have popped out a couple of kids and are putting money away for retirement.

On my floor, there are several roommates who, through lack of social skills or maturity, have done completely disgusting or unforgivable acts.

One of these people is Melanie. Melanie is the roommate of Dana. Melanie unfortunatly is the type that lacks social maturity. For the first few weeks that Melanie and Dana began to room together everything went very smoothly. This is because Dana had a boyfriend with whom she spent the majority of her time with. Dana rarely came back to the dorm room that she and Melanie shared, and typically it was for a change of clothes.

This gave Melanie the freedom to do whatever she wanted in their room. Unfortunately, the whirlwind romance eventually died out, as many do. This meant that Dana now had the time, well really the necessity, to live in the dorm full time. This meant that she would sleep in the room, shower in the community showers, and eat at the dining courts.

However, this did not sit well with Melanie, who, due most likely to a poor up-bringing, had never really learned to share. This made the adjustment that many are naturally able to do very difficult. This lead to many back-handed sabotages committed by Melanie.

At first they started out very small. A dry-erase board wiped clean so that Melanie could inform the world of her plans for the day, a snooze button pushed nine times, and even a broken lamp was thrown into the fire as fuel.

Eventually, though, Dana began to retaliate which made matters much worse.

The fight, that is currently still raging, has reached its peak, when one day Dana went to take a shower. She then came back to the room and de-robed in order to change. At this point Melanie had just gotten back and saw an oppurtunity. As people were passing by in the hallway she decided to hold the door open so that all could see the very upset Dana- naked.

The moral of this is that some roommates are just spoiled little brats and really need a wake up call. As of yet, Dana has not retaliated and I hope that she does not. If you happen to be one of the people who are so unlucky as to be faced with a roommate like Melanie, all I can suggest is to put in for a room change immediately, some people just will not change.

How to stream line your shower stuff

When it comes to the showers in the dorms, the less time spent in them the better. I quickly learned this in the first few weeks of school. In order to ensure that you get in and out what i suggest is to do the really obvious thing and get a shower caddy.
However obvious this is, it is very important to get the right shower caddy. You want one that if it gets wet- its not going to start to smell. This means no fabric. I have seen girls heading to the shower with cloth totes all the time, and I just do not know how they manage with them. You would have to pop your head in and out of the shower every time that you need some soap or shampoo, which can get awkward very fast. When it comes to shower caddies, I suggest getting a plastic one with plenty of holes for draining. Bed Bath and Beyond has a very nice selection of plastic totes that are both cute and functional.

Before heading off to the showers, make sure that you have everything that you need, such as shampoo, razor, soap, etc. This may sound simple but I cannot count the number of times that I have begun to head off to the showers, had to stop and go back to my room because I forgot some small thing. The amount of time that I have spent turning around and going back and forth from my room is definitely not worth it. Take ten seconds and look around. Also, you do not want to overload your caddy, because it is not fun when you have to stop in a robe or towel and pick everything up. Try to keep it balanced and you probably want to keep all of your basic necessities in it at all times.

One very important thing to have- and by important I mean the number one item that you need- is a robe. Not a towel wrap. Towel wraps are cute and convenient, but when it comes down to it a bath robe is much more functional and comfortable. When its cold in the morning and you want something to toss on really quickly before you head to the bathroom, a robe is ideal. It's kinda difficult to toss a towel wrap on over your pajamas. Trust me, I have tried and you just wind up looking ridiculous.

Also, make sure that you have a towel, and if necessary, a change of clothes. This is VERY important because you will be soaking and have to walk back to your room freezing and dripping. If you do not want to change in front of your roommate or if you or your roommate has company then you could always change in the bathroom. In my experience the best place to change is in the stall that has the bathtub in it. No one ever uses the tub (well almost no one) so the stall is pretty much always open. However, this tub is safer and cleaner to use than people realize. Every one is so disgusted by the thought that other people bathe in it that no one does, so it is a lot cleaner than people think.

Calendars: not just for the date

For a very long time, calendars have been used solely for telling the date, and while this is the main intent behind having a calendar, it does not have to stop there.
There are many kinds of calendars for pretty much every single hobby, belief system, or childhood icon that there is out there, and I mean every- one time I even found a calendar for witchcraft. The sad thing is that every year we typically throw out our old calendars so that we can get a new one that has the actual date on it. This means that whatever pictures are on the calendar get thrown out too. However, if you really like the pictures that are on your calendar, then you can save them and incorporate them into your dorm room decor.

In order to do this i suggest pulling the pages out of the old calendar and fixing them onto the wall with masking tape, ticky-tac, command strips, or old chewing gum. In doing this you can cover more of the wall and put your taste into the room. Even if you do not have a calendar on hand that is old and has out-lived its purpose, then you can wait until calendars go on sale and purchase them at a reduced price.
If just sticking them onto the wall is not appealing to you, then you could always find picture frames and put the calendar pages- picture side up- in the frames and then either adhere them to the wall or hang them on the wall.

College and the Multi-Vitamin

While living in a dorm room, ones health may begin to slip due to poor eating habits. One can avoid this by taking a multi-vitamin. Anyone who was ever a college student living away from home should know that you don't exactly eat right when away from home. Having the new freedom of there being no parents around to tell you what to eat can sometimes lead to dessert for breakfast, lunch, and dinner (and in-between snacks). This behavior makes our vitamin intake slip a little. This is why taking a multi-vitamin can really help you recover from this deficit and not interrupt your celebratory dessert feast.

I personally take one-a-day as my vitamin supplement. However, there are many different vitamins out there, if you really wanted to you could take Flintstones Chewables. While I sometimes go for the name brands, the generic brands put the same basic vitamins into your body. You should look around for what the best vitamin for you is.

Covering White Walls

One of the really lame things about living in a dorm is that you cannot paint the walls. This leaves you with stark white walls that make your room not quite so inviting. There are several ways to counter the plain white wall effect. The number one way is to cover them with something removable.

To accomplish this, one could do several things. One could buy posters and put them on the walls. However, when it comes to this method of wall decoration, one should always remember that posters cost money. While you can use posters, another problem with this method is that it would take an awful lot of posters to cover the whole wall. Posters may or may not be the way to go for you, it depends on how much white you want to be on the walls.

Another method is to get pictures and stick them to your walls. This method is kind of like your bulletin board did not stop at the edges, but kept on going. I like this idea because it shows pictures of your friends and family, so people who come into your room can get a good idea of what you are like as a person. The problems with this are that your pictures can get damaged, destroyed, or lost (also if you have a cute sister every guy who comes into the room is going to make a comment). This means that you need to at least have copies of them. This method can be more expensive than the poster method as a result. Also, if you run out of pictures then you will have a space with a lot of pictures and then a space with no pictures, which will look very odd.

Other than using posters and pictures you could also use pictures from magazines, and stick them on the walls. This method is really good because it also allows people who come into the room to get a feeling for what your personality is by what magagzines you have up. It is also really cheap because several magazines could cover all of the walls. Many college dorms have free magazines in them, and typically are found near or in the mail room. If your dorm does not have free magazines then you could petition the dorm for free magazines.

One last option is to get blankets, tapestries, or sheets and hang them on your walls. This can be very cheap or very expensive. Going the expensive route is easy because if you want to find something thats over-priced then you will find it, but the cheap route can be just as easy. For example you could go to salvation army and purchase sheets that are cheap and then tie dye them. I would personally make sure that they were washed though. You can also buy tapestries and blankets very easily online. Most campuses have shops that sell things with the campus logo on them. This means that they will most likely sell blankets, which can then be hung up on the walls.

One very important thing to remember when putting anything on the walls of your dorm room is that whatever you damage, you will have to pay for. This is why is suggest using wall putty or masking tape to put things on the walls. This way you will not have to pay big for something minor.

The Tools of a Clean Room

One of the biggest problems with moving into a dorm room (aside from getting along with a psycho roommate) is keeping it clean. Most people are used to having a mom pick up after them. The thing is that unless you are a really strange person with a very strange family, your Mother is not going to follow you to college. Part of cutting the cord is learning to pick up after yourself. You do not want to be that person on the floor who has the really smelly or dirty room. There are several areas that one must remember to clean. They are dusting, vacuuming, laundry, and taking out the trash.

First on the list is vacuuming. This is very important because if one does not vaccum their room then it will probably start to smell bad (by probably I mean that is will for sure smell bad, and you don't want to be that person). I personally think that one should vacuum at least once a month, and if you have a roommate then your room can be vacuumed twice a month since I assume that they will be cleaning it as well. I personally feel that a persons room should be vacuumed at least once a week, especially for people who have allergies. There are many options when it comes to vacuums. Many dorms have vacuums that the floor shares and can be found in a closet somewhere in the building. However, if this is not something that sounds like a good idea to you, then you could always get a small vacuum for your room. There are shark vacs out there which are not as expensive as some of the heavy duty vacuums out there. Shark vac makes cordless stick vacuums which are nice because they are not very bulky, and so they are easily put into a closet for storage. Shark also has hand helds vacuums which are more compact, although they are better for small messes than for vacuuming large areas. Pictured on the above right is a cordless sweeper shark vac that costs $59.99. Other cordless sweepers are pictured on the site and go as low as $29.99. Beneath that is a picture of a cordless hand held shark vac. This shark vac costs $39.99. This is the only cordless handheld currently featured on the sharkvac website.

Another important thing to make sure you are doing for upkeep of your dorm room is to dust. I suggest dusting at least once a week. I prefer the disposable dusters such as swiffer. I like these because they seem to trap most of the dust and, of course, you can throw them out. For the most part these are not expensive. There are also dust cloths which work just as well. I suggest getting a starter pack and then deciding what brand is best for you. If someone has allergies then it is very important for them to have a clean place to breath, so you might have to dust the room more than normal.

As for the laundry, I suggest doing it once to twice a week. Also, keep your laundry in your closet, because it does smell. The last big category for cleaning, in my opinion, is the trash. Take this out as needed. If it smells get it out of the room fast. I suggest alternating with your roommate.

However, no matter how well you clean, it will not mean much if your roommate does not pick up after themselves. One thing that I have found to be very effective is to put up a calender and write down what days you did what. This way even if your roommate does not clean, then at least you have proof and can tell them that they need to start pulling their weight.

One of the other lesser known categories of clean is being organized. You cannot have a really cluttered dorm room, because it is just not a good atmosphere to live in. A dorm room is your bedroom, dining room, living room, and kitchen. On top of all that its also a little bit bigger than the room you live in back home (wherever that is). It is very important for you to minimize the amount of filth and clutter. I suggest taking an hour out every week to make sure that it stays clean. If you are a slob then you should definitely keep your room clean just because of the fact that you dont want your roommate to hate you because you can not manage to keep your space clean.

Of course if cleaning is not something that you intend on doing then I suggest getting some serious air fresheners.